The Marvels
Disney CEO Bob Iger has made about five different major headlines after speaking at the NYT Dealbook Summit on Wednesday (the same one Elon Musk called out Iger directly for stopping ads on Twitter). But of all them, this one may be the most…brutal.
The Marvels has set unfortunate records for the lowest MCU opening and one of the lowest MCU critic scores and what is likely to be lowest MCU total box office haul. And Iger believes he knows why this happened:
“Quality needs attention…It doesn’t happen by accident. Quantity, in our case, diluted quality.” Then, more specifically moving into The Marvels: “There wasn’t as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives [that are] really looking over what’s being done day after day after day.”
It’s a really, really harsh comment for one of his own films, one that I would argue he’s actually misjudging. The Marvels was certainly not an MCU all-timer, but it was easily better than Captain Marvel, the billion-dollar original movie that preceded it, and losing $800 million or so off that total this time has a lot more to do with MCU and superhero fatigue than the quality of this specific film.
The Marvels
I’ve talked about this previously, but there is a recent trend of superhero, specifically MCU exhaustion, going on around movie reviewers. Previously, they used to score films as high or higher than fans the majority of the time in the first decade or so of the MCU. Now? Fan scores are almost always higher, often significantly so. In the case of The Marvels, the critics’ 61% is much lower than fans’ 83% score. And again, this is likely due to superhero fatigue which has hit a whole bunch of other films, including what appears to be a pending disaster over at DC, Aquaman 2, where presales suggest it too will not come anywhere close to the billion dollar haul of the first movie, and no one even has any idea if it’s good or not yet.
But Iger’s comment about “not enough executive supervision on set” is certainly not terribly wise to say for a film starring three women and directed by a black woman, who incidentally had the highest opening for a film directed by a black woman…ever. I don’t know if he’s talking about Kevin Feige needing to literally be walking around there as it films, but it comes off as dismissive and extremely condescending.
Later, Iger would go on to say in a different part of the talk that Disney movies need to be entertaining first and sending a message second. Between The Marvels comments and this one, it feels like Iger fundamentally misunderstands the entire problem. For instance, what’s the “message” of The Marvels that failed? Sometimes you hurt people you’re trying to help? Women can have superhero teams too? And on the other side of that coin, Andor, a series explicitly about doing whatever it takes to overthrow an oppressive, fascistic government is by far one of the best things Disney has made in this cursed era.
Iger’s comments give me less hope for the future rather than more. I fundamentally agree we need less Star Wars and MCU content overall, as it’s not really an “event” anymore at all for the most part, but everything else he’s saying sounds way off base.
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